Ottawa-Orléans MPP Marie-France Lalonde became Ontario’s minister of government and consumer services Monday morning as Premier Kathleen Wynne shuffled her cabinet in preparation for a two-year march to the next election in 2018.

The changes are a facelift rather than a total reconstruction, with most senior ministers remaining exactly where they were before: the ministers of finance, health, transportation, environment and economic development all kept their jobs, and so did many lower-level ministers.

Wynne’s right-hand woman, Deb Matthews, stayed as deputy premier but exchanged her position as president of the province’s treasury board, responsible for squeezing every possible dollar out of the province’s budgets to try to close Ontario’s multibillion-dollar annual budget deficit, for one in charge of advanced education, skills development and “digital government.”

Matthews’ shift is symbolic of the whole shuffle: The fundamentals of Wynne’s government stay the same, but she’s turning its attention from getting Ontario’s act together to working up new successes that will show the Liberals are worth re-electing in two years.

Balancing the budget, signing new contracts with teachers and cleaning up old scandals have been necessary but probably won’t get the Liberals the votes they want. Economic growth, training a first-rate workforce and competently executing new climate-change and infrastructure strategies might.

Implementation is sometimes harder than planning, she said, which is why the cabinet is bigger than it used to be.

“We need to grow the economy and we need to create jobs and we need to focus on Ontario’s strengths,” Wynne said. “We’ve got some very, very important items on our plan that need focus and need the energy of a strong ministry.”

Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown called it adding weight to a sinking ship.

The cabinet is 40 per cent women and has more people of colour in prominent positions, including its first black education minister in Mitzie Hunter and its first South Asian attorney general in Ottawa’s Yasir Naqvi.

Lalonde, a former social worker and nursing-home operator but a rookie politician, had been the government whip. Her new ministry issues health cards and drivers’ licences, runs the government’s human-resources and records-retention systems, and applies consumer-protection laws. It’s not a flashy gig but it’s a good first assignment to test whether a newbie with potential can handle responsibility.

To take over as attorney general, Ottawa Centre’s Naqvi is leaving his post as minister of community safety and correctional services. That rescues him from direct responsibility for the province’s woeful jails, which he oversaw for two bad years of barely averted strikes, inmates made to sleep in showers, fired administrators and damning reports from the provincial ombudsman and auditor general.

One of the few bright spots in Naqvi’s management of that file was a report just finished about fixing the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre. It includes more than a dozen recommendations on how the courts could stop flooding the jails with inmates who don’t need to be there, for instance by being more efficient about bail hearings and making sure the justices of the peace who run them are properly trained.

Now he is the attorney general, and he’ll be handing those recommendations off to himself, while leaving a Sault Ste-Marie MPP, David Orazietti, to take over the rest.

And speaking of rescues, Ottawa West-Nepean’s Bob Chiarelli is leaving the Energy Ministry and becoming minister of infrastructure, which means he won’t have to be the public face of high energy prices and new wind farms anymore. Both ministries demand a lot of technical knowledge but the infrastructure minister’s main job is paying for highways and light-rail lines that people really want to see built, which is much more fun.

(“He is tough. And he’s done amazing work,” Wynne said of Chiarelli.)

Sudbury’s Glenn Thibeault, the former New Democrat MP elected in that controversial byelection last year, gets Chiarelli’s former post at Energy, a job many people would see as a punishment rather than a prize.

Wynne managed to engineer a cabinet shuffle in which almost nobody got demoted. Four old veterans departed more or less willingly and she named more ministers, but nobody was dropped without warning and only two ministers lost responsibilities. Michael Chan gave up his citizenship and immigration duties but kept international trade; Tracy MacCharles gave up responsibilities for children and youth, a ministry with a real budget for a range of children’s health services in particular, and took on accessibility, where she’ll be more of an advocate than an overseer (she keeps women’s issues).

Those are minor changes. Kathleen Wynne’s government is much as it was before, for better or for worse.

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